Like any good hipster, director Alexis Dos Santos is a melange of influences: There's the Larry Clark-like fixation on near-underage threesomes, the formalistic touch of the French New Wave, the exoticism of his Argentinian heritage and the Anglo artiness of his British film school roots. All of those forces find their way onto the screen in Unmade Beds, his Manohla Dargis-praised tale of Axel (Fernando Tielve), a young man searching for his birth father while couch-surfing and sleeping his way through boho London.
As Unmade Beds had its LAFF premiere this week, I talked to the unkempt auteur about hip clothes, his first film, Glue, and the artistic siren song of the menage a trois.
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Anthony Mackie didn't need much convincing to take the role of Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, the by-the-book foil to Jeremy Renner's world-weary U.S. Army bomb defuser in the excellent new Iraq thriller The Hurt Locker. The only potential sticking point was Iraq itself -- the thematic albatross that has crippled more films and filmmakers than perhaps any other subject of the last decade. The veteran actor talked to Movieline recently about what makes a war film work, why so many anti-war films fail and the next great story he's got his eye on.
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With Afghan Star, London-based filmmaker Havana Marking has crafted something utterly extraordinary -- a fly-on-the-wall glimpse at a shattered culture beginning to "awaken from a dream," as one Afghan puts it. And it's all thanks to the unlikeliest of things: a televised singing competition that has quickly become a runaway national phenomenon. Even the most impoverished of Kabul slum-dwellers somehow find a way to watch Afghan Star, cheering on their favorites with the same ferocity as the most obsessive Adam Lambert fan. Contestants are of both genders and from every province of that civil war-torn country, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, American Idol-style, as host Daoud Sadiqi affects his best Ryan Seacrest and reveals the week's voting results.
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Now that the Academy has announced that it will be expanding the Best Picture race to ten nominees, everyone in town has an opinion about whether the move was a brilliant reinvention or a go-for-broke bailout. Movieline went straight to the top -- Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis -- to get the lowdown on the Oscars' bombshell announcement.
Sid, how did you manage to keep this huge announcement secret?
[Laughing] It was my biggest accomplishment on this! You know, I talked to the board and we all agreed that it was a major announcement and we had to keep quiet. But still, I'm not sure how it happened. It might happen again in my life, but I'm not counting on it.
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It's long been taken for granted that Kathryn Bigelow is Hollywood's best female action director -- and that's a reputation she firmed up before tomorrow's release of The Hurt Locker, her best film so far. The Iraq War bomb squad thriller is a shot of adrenaline for not just the audience, but Bigelow's career, which includes classics like Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days. The whip-smart director recently sat down with Movieline to talk all things Hurt Locker, though the conversation soon veered to Point Break parodies, wooing the King of Jordan, and a certain vampire franchise she'd been heavily touted for.
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In the upcoming comedy Paper Heart, not only do stars Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera play themselves, but director Nicholas Jasenovec casts an actor to play his own stand-in, who directs Yi on a voyage of romantic self-discovery. It's a very meta juggling act, but one that's a perfect fit for Yi, the alternative comedienne who stole scenes in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up.
As the film plays at LAFF this week, I sat down with Jasenovec (pictured here, at bottom-left, with his cast) to get the lowdown on his chemistry with Yi, the behind-the-scenes incidents that changed the film, and the double-edged sword that came from the film's hyped reception this year at Sundance. And no, I didn't send an actor to play myself in the interview.
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When I met up with Kerry Washington in a hotel room at the Beverly Hilton, she was poured into a slinky dress, wearing perilously high heels, and busy cleaning up some dirty dishes as though the Hilton didn't have plenty of cleaning ladies who'd be around soon to do just that. In her onscreen roles, Washington shows just as much surprising commitment, and as Marybeth in Buddy Giovinazzo's Life is Hot in Cracktown, she goes the furthest she's had to yet: playing a drug-addicted, male-to-female transsexual. It's a role as unlikely as Washington's dish-cleaning glamour girl, and as she told Movieline, it's one she had to fight for.
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After a break from the genre that earned him an Oscar in 2006, An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim has brought his new documentary It Might Get Loud to the Los Angeles Film Festival. (Loud opens Aug. 14 in New York and L.A.) The film sketches portraits of three generations of rock heroes -- Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White -- while composing a bigger picture of the art, sound and influence of the electric guitar in each of their lives. Calling Movieline from the set of his current production, Guggenheim took a break to discuss the rock film he didn't want to make, Jack White's two-hour songwriting clinic, and how a classic concert movie provided his breakthrough for An Inconvenient Truth.
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Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are having a moment, and they know it.
As the screenwriters behind the year's two biggest films, Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (cowritten with Ehren Kruger), the writing partners have solidified their position as Hollywood's top screenwriting duo. It's a long way from Hercules and Xena, where the two began, and they'd be the first to admit their journey wasn't the one they planned on. Now, as all they touch turns to gold (and even the projects they've recently produced -- including Eagle Eye, The Proposal, and Fringe -- have become unqualified hits) they sat down with Movieline to discuss their unlikely path, Megan Fox's big mouth, and just whose idea it was to give one of the Transformers a gold tooth.
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Time once again to don your reading glasses and curl up for another of Movieline's One-Page Screenplays -- the ultimate development solution for our time-management-challenged, eco-friendly times.
Today's celebrity screenwriter is Michael France, writer of Fantastic Four, The Punisher, Hulk, GoldenEye, and middle-era Stallone masterwork, Cliffhanger. He's cooked up a drawing room zombie-horror-mystery we think you'll quite enjoy.
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It has got to be a great Monday for Anne Fletcher. Her third feature, The Proposal, shattered projections this weekend, taking in over $34 million at the box office. That's the biggest opening of its star Sandra Bullock's career -- by a long shot -- and ranks among the biggest ever for a female director.
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In an age where well-known actors aspire to become viral video stars, 18-year-old Bo Burnham is attempting the opposite. Already well-known to a certain age group for the witty songs he posts to Youtube ("My Whole Family..." and "High School Party" are two of his biggest hits), he's been taken under the wing of Judd Apatow, who's shepherding a Burnham-written rebuttal to High School Musical. That association has landed him a cameo in Apatow's upcoming Funny People (where he harangues Jason Schwartzman in the film's sitcom spoof Yo Teach!), an accomplishment which might seem more impressive if Burnham hadn't already put out an EP and headlined his own Comedy Central special. We talked to the young multihyphenate about how it all came together.
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The Last Beekeeper (LAFF screenings tomorrow and Thursday) is a documentary tribute to an ancient profession -- one subject calls it the "second oldest" -- rapidly going extinct. Clocking in at a lean 66 minutes, Jeremy Simmons's film profiles three apiarists struggling mightily to keep their businesses afloat. In today's market, that requires loading up their bees onto 18-wheelers and making the long trek to California for the annual almond crop pollination. (There's just no more money in honey, hunny.) But the journey is a devastating one, as the mysterious colony collapse disorder or CCD -- an HIV-like bee pandemic with no known cause or cure, that's claimed 35% drops in North American honeybee populations last year alone -- has been wiping out thousands of their flock a time.
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As recommended this morning in Movieline Attractions, the stop-motion puppet animation $9.99 offers heady doses of drama, comedy, perversion and bittersweet romance in one of the world's most dysfunctional apartment buildings. But for Israeli author Etgar Keret, 10 of whose short stories form the basis for the film, one subplot in particular stands out. And considering its emphasis on puppet sex, how can you blame him?
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An unlikely mashup of two of today's biggest headlines (the Iranian election protests and Chastity Bono's sex reassignment), the timely new documentary Be Like Others addresses a loophole that's begun booming thanks to Iran's inhospitable treatment of gay men: the sex change industry. Faced with a society that outlaws homosexuality and promises often-fatal punishment, gay Iranians like Anoosh (pictured above right, with boyfriend Ali) are turning to Tehran doctor Bahram Mir-Jalali and his transsexual counselor Vida in order to become women, a process sanctioned and practically encouraged by Iranian law. We talked to director Tanaz Eshaghian about her eye-opening film, set to premiere on HBO2 June 24.
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